They don’t make economists like Albert Hirschman any more :(

Throughout my life, I have not been a great fan of buying books.  I have extensively relied on libraries, which,   here in the US, are wonderfully stocked.  Out of the few books that I did purchase as a graduate student on a restricted budget, I re-sold most of them.  But, I made sure I retained two books by Albert Hirschman:  Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and The Rhetoric of Reaction.

(Yes, Marx is a holdover from my teenage years!)

There was one other book of his that I loved, but didn't buy; I borrowed from USC's libraries Hirschman's Development Projects Observed.  I learnt considerably more from these three books than I did from many, many journal articles and books put together.  They were phenomenally educational, showed me how powerful ideas do not have to be presented in obese books, and that those ideas can be presented relatively jargon-free for any thinking person to understand.

In writing about Hirschman, Francis Fukuyama, too, writes about these three books, for the most part of his essay.

He did very little quantitative work, and will be remembered for a series of slender books written in an accessible English that non-economists have no trouble understanding. He did not observe the methodological straightjacket his discipline imposed, but wandered off instead into other fields like politics and philosophy in an attempt to recover some of the unified social theory of the 18th and 19th centuries–hoping to avoid, as he put it, the “specialization-induced intellectual poverty in this field.” His legacy is not data collection or micro results, but rather some very big concepts that continue to shape the way we think about not just development but public policy more generally.

Yes, yes, yes a gazillion times to this.

In graduate school, I was not a fan of the quantitative work that most economists were pursuing.  I felt that most of those economists were not convincing me with their stories and were, therefore, playing with calculus and statistics to razzle-dazzle me.  Hirschman, on the other hand, spoke to me.  Commonsense thinking.  Logical, and not rhetorical. Nothing polemical. Nothing ideological. Unchained to any particular field of inquiry.

I am delighted that Fukuyama notes about Hisrchman's "hiding hand" argument.  I hope that the likes of the do-nothing GOP will read this essay, particularly the concluding paragraphs, where Fukuyama writes:

One of my favorite Hirschmanian concepts was that of the Hiding Hand, a play on Adam Smith’s Hidden Hand, which he laid out in his 1967 book Development Projects Observed. The book analyzed a number of World Bank projects on which he consulted, and noted how a number of them failed to achieve their objectives or else produced unexpected results. But he argued that the failure to anticipate unintended consequences was actually a good thing. If we could foresee all the possible negative consequences of our actions, we would become completely paralyzed–not just as governments seeking social change, but as individuals wanting to try new things in work, love, or life in general. The Hiding Hand that blinded us in this fashion was thus Providential.

There are quite a few of us who are fans of Hirschman.  The uber-blogging academic, Daniel Drezner is one of those. Drezner even awards, well, not a real prize, an "Albie."  Drezner refers to:

any book, journal article, magazine piece, op-ed, or blog post published in the [last] calendar year that made you rethink how the world works in such a way that you will never be able "unthink" the argument.   

Yes, it is impossible for me to "unthink" the idea of "exit, voice, and loyalty," for instance.  I relate that idea of the "hiding hand" even to the neurosurgery that my daughter is pursuing.  She said that if she had known everything that she now knows about the hours and stress of being a neurosurgery resident, leave alone the life after the long seven year residency, she might not have ever gotten into this specialization.  To a large extent, all our lives, and the progress of humanity depends on this variation of fools rushing in.  Because, knowledge can also paralyze us from doing.  Which is why a 23-year old rushes with excitement to a neurosurgery residency without that knowledge.  If ever your health needs a neurosurgeon's treatment, then be thankful for that "hiding hand."

Fukuyama ends with this:

They don’t unfortunately make development economists like Albert Hirschman any more.

Well, not only "development economists."

But, at least, we had one Albert Hirschman.